Her strat is true, although Horde players have derps just like Alliance, that will just follow the pack blindly and not pay attn to mage.
My friends and I always get to mage and make sure that we can at least stall the Allies, if they decide to come to our mage. If we have good callouts, it usually works.
But I’ve also been in Ashran where our Horde team was just going thru the motions and not actually fighting hard over objectives, and we’ve lost.
I’m just reporting based on what I’ve seen personally. I will say though, that if your choice is between going to our mage or contesting woods, then go woods. At least there you have your best chance, and this is what alliance was doing when they were winning more often.
If you do go mage, even if you’re able to kill him, horde by that time has flower buffs. So we can usually win a pvp battle, push alliance back to their base, then kill your mage, and end up winning anyway. Not always of course, but often enough.
This is why I always call out this strategy at the start of every Ashran. I’ve noticed that if everyone remains quite, then folks just follow the herd and there’s little cooperation. However, if just one person lays out a strat, then folks actually tend to follow it pretty well (there are always going to be few mouth-breathers).
My friends and I always get to mage and make sure that we can at least stall the Allies, if they decide to come to our mage. If we have good callouts, it usually works.
This is also what I do. While most horde will go to flowers first, I go to the top of our tower. I can see across the map, and will call out if ally are going woods or mage. People actually tend to respond pretty well to my call outs.
I/we have two strats for Ashran. I have ppl watch mage, sometimes I do it myself. We have one mow them down strat and the other one is play objectives and then slaughter them all. We didn’t lose one epic bg tonight. Brawls were another story… 
It’s like herding cats to get pugs to listen sometimes, but when they do, it’s a sight to behold. Ooking Ally in the dooker allll night long. 
Yeah, this is a tricky one.
The whole “speak up and take charge” technique totally works (in that if you’re the only one being loud, people will listen), but it can backfire in stupid ways. You can give perfectly sane advice on strategy, and then when the people get lit up by the luck of the draw and the other team is coordinated and stronger, they blame you.
WHAT A DUMB CALL, GOOD IDEA GOING OGRE
…etc. I tend to ebb and flow on whether or not I’m interested in engaging in chat on a given Ashran. Sometimes when people listen and I can help answer a question or two before the BG starts, we end up having a really good one. Other times I’ll get merc mode Horde just feeding “to end it” while simultaneously telling us how bad “the Alliance” are, despite them also being “Alliance” for the last 15 minutes.
It is the same exact vibe as it was in 2016 Ashran. If you take charge, you actually need one or two events to win before people will listen to you, but once they get the taste of victory, they’ll follow you anywhere. I miss the endless variant of Ashran, honestly, even though I know many hated it.
Pugs still give me crap sometimes. 80% of the time they listen. I find ppl think they know what to do, but they want reassurance. They second guess where they should be next and rely on those who run these things ad nauseum. Eventually, lead enough ppl will listen.
Just the idea, that going to the farthest possible point from your spawn, and the closest to the enemy, at the start of the game when you KNOW they are all in the forest is just…no other word but dumb really.
Not only is it a bad tactical choice on its own merits, it spreads the team out due to respawns, and pretty much assures you that you will be rolled the rest of the BG.
I gave up on trying to reason with people in BGs though, especially Alliance in Ashran. Once in a while you can convince people to stick together and pull out a win, but it’s not worth the abuse and caps lock diatribes from the mentally inept.
Honestly based on my experience I’d say anywhere from 60 to 75% of the players on your Epic BG team are just going through the motions. Most of them are probably watching Netflix on a second monitor and have zero desire to adapt. These folks just want to get the match over as quickly as possible.
Example of this - I have lost almost every single IOC because Horde absolutely refuses to do anything about glaives.
It works fine if they actually kill the mage without 20 ppl dying in the process either due to knockback or horde defending .
When it works well it’s a huge blow to horde morale and ppl start afking quickly .
Yeah, kinda. This is why I called it a gambit.
As a side note, I did make a macro last night which explains my “don’t rush mage” strategy last night and used it, and 3 people immediately chimed in with things like “yes, do that, that’s smart”, and we won.
… I then tried it in the next game and got called a tryhard immediately … and we won again, despite losing ogre. (shrug)
I don’t blame alliance for losing Ashran … it’s a completely lopsided map favoring Horde . Literally everything in there favors Horde.
In legion the bosses were killed a ton. Haven’t been in since SL launch but late bfa I tried and never saw them die.
I haven’t seen a boss kill (either side) in SL, yet. I’ve seen both get pulled (incredibly rare), but they don’t get under 90% HP before that team loses on resources.
Rushing mage at the start for a crack at the +50 points is actually the most consistent winning strategy for Ally, the Dark Woods strat is far more risky from what I have seen.
How the Dark Woods rush strat usually plays out, with Alliance pugs:
When you kill the mage after a successful rush, your team is immediately up by 50 points. As long as the Ally team isn’t absolutely terrible and can (somewhat) hold their own in the main teamfight, the points lead from getting a mage kill tends to hold over the duration of the game.
Sometimes they get stomped so badly that even the +50 points lead from killing mage quickly gets erased as the game progresses, but in those matches the gear/DPS disparity between the teams is obviously so large that you would have lost no matter what strategy was chosen (mage, Dark Woods, RoC).
Going for the mage sucks because the Horde mage was given the knock back spell that sends half the Alliance off the tower, major disadvantage probably designed by Ion.
Had a funny Ashran in the morning where the Alliance came into the woods , wiped us there and killed the Ogre . Got a 30 point lead and still managed to lose. Horde won with 40 points in the end , no Mages were killed . Just a pure death match on the road.